—   Ac - Af   —

ACADEMIA
The academic life at universities and colleges, along with their usual esoteric and bourgeois concerns and pursuits. Also carries the implication that those who live and work there are divorced from the struggles of the masses in the real world. Of course, there have been an atypical few who have managed to contribute to the revolutionary struggles of the people even while holding down positions at universities. But on the whole academia has a well-deserved bad reputation among serious revolutionary Marxists.

“Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!” —Marx, after being well rid of any prospect of finding a professorship at a university.

ACCURACY

“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.” —Wyatt Earp, Old West lawman and gun-fighter.

ACTION AT A DISTANCE   [Philosophy of Science]
The supposed ability of one material thing (or system) to affect another material thing (or system) even though there is some distance between the two and there is no material contact between them. At a bowling alley a player can knock down the bowling pins at a distance, but this is only because he or she rolls a bowling ball down the lane to do so. In talking about “action at a distance” we are excluding such situations, and talking only about cases (or supposed cases) where there is no relevant intervening material connection of any kind, including via sound waves, light waves, etc. Such genuine action at a distance, if it were to truly exist, would seem to be a challenge to a materialist conception of reality.
        Philosophical idealists, for example, often suppose that mere thoughts might be able to cause a distant object to move, or that “God” can alter any aspect of physical reality just by willing it. We materialists reject such things outright as pure nonsense. However, it is true that a person may “will” their hand to move (i.e., decide to move it) and it will (normally) do so. How is this possible? It is because this “willing” of the movement is actually just a high-level way of viewing part of a chain of physically connected material actions (including the complex generation of the “decision” by electro-chemical neural networks in the brain and the transmission of the appropriate nerve impulses to muscles, etc.).
        Even in ancient times there was the dominant feeling among thinkers that there is really no such thing as “action at a distance”, that really there is always some intervening material connections or forces. The notion of action at a distance was rejected by the atomists and by Aristotle, for example, and in more recent times by Newton and Einstein.
        The primary argument for the existence of action at a distance is gravity, which keeps the moon orbiting around the earth and the earth-moon system orbiting around the sun despite the vast vacuum of space between them. Nevertheless, there are ways to make sense of this from a materialist perspective. One way is to postulate gravitational fields which permeate the space between objects and transmit an attractive force (such as via particles called gravitons), in a way similar to a magnetic field which exists around a magnet and may cause iron filings to move even without direct contact with the magnet itself. Einstein, with his general theory of relativity, provided an alternative materialist explanation for gravity, namely that space (or space-time) is itself a special form of material substance which is warped by ordinary matter and thus leads moving objects to alter their speed and/or direction of motion. In either case modern physics interprets gravity in a way that rejects the notion of any true action at a distance. What may appear to be action at a distance turns out on closer investigation to involve physical connection of one sort or another through an intervening medium (which is not really empty as was originally supposed).

“I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses.... It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies. That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.” —Isaac Newton, in a letter to the theologian Richard Bentley, 1693.

“Coulomb’s Law [of electrostatic attraction or repulsion] and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation are examples of what physicists sometimes refer to as ‘action at a distance’ laws—in the sense that when the laws were formulated, no known mediator of the interaction existed....
        “For both Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Coulomb’s Law, one might think that the respective forces involved are instantaneously affected by a change in locations of the relevant objects. However, this is not the case. For example, for Coulomb’s Law, if one of the two charges is moved, then the force acting on the second charge does not immediately change. We know from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity that signals do not propagate faster than the speed of light; thus, if one charge is moved, then a time delay must exist for the second particle to ‘become aware’ of this movement. Moreover, if the first charge were suddenly plucked from the experiment, the second charge would be sensitive to this removal only some time later.
        “The same kind of delay applies to masses with a gravitational attraction, such as the case for Earth circling the Sun. If the Sun were suddenly removed, Earth would keep orbiting about the missing Sun for several minutes because the gravitational influence cannot travel faster than light speed. During the time needed for this influence to propagate, one body continues to experience an electrical or gravitational influence from the other body as if the missing object still existed.” —Clifford Pickover, Archimedes to Hawking (2008), pp. 153-4.
         [This time delay in the interaction is a further proof that there is no true “action at a distance”; either the force fields which exist in the intervening space, or—perhaps the same thing—the characteristics of the space itself, changes locally and is only over time propagated by a long series of local changes to the distant object. —S.H.]

ACTUARY
A person who uses mathematics and statistics to calculate insurance and annuity premiums, reserves and dividends.

ADHIAR
[In India:] A sharecropper. (One of several terms used in India for sharecroppers.)

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR
A college or university professor who teaches individual courses for a very low salary at one or more schools but who has no tenure nor health care or other benefits. The fact that ever larger sections of the higher education faculty are adjunct professors is another blatant sign of the rapid deterioration of the educational system in the U.S.

ADULT CHILDREN LIVING WITH PARENTS
As the U.S. and world capitalist economic crisis continues to develop, fewer and fewer young adults—even those with jobs—have enough money or established credit to qualify for a mortgage for a home of their own, and very often cannot even affort the prevailing high prices for renting an apartment. For this reason more and more young adults are moving back in with their parents. This trend is becoming ever more pronounced. By 2016 “the share of of Americans age 18 to 34 living with relatives hit 40% according to U.S. Census data, the highest it’s been since 1940” at the end of the Great Depression. [Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 26, 2016-Jan. 8, 2017, p. 11.] By 2023, the percentage of Americans aged 18 to 29 living with their family increased to 45%, and totaled around 23 million. [Bloomberg report summarized in The Week, Oct. 6, 2023, p. 29.]
        While moving in with your parents or other relatives is better than living on the streets (which growing tens of thousands of people are now forced to do even in the U.S.), this is obviously also not much of a long term solution to the growing housing crisis in the capitalist world. And this is yet another sign of just how serious the capitalist economic crisis has already become.

ADVANCED AND BACKWARD
Divisions among the people based on their relative political understanding and activity. Sometimes this is simply a bifurcation, or conceptual division of the population into two categories. On other occasions it is a 3-way division which includes an “intermediate” section of the population. Of course it is also possible to create even more categories, such as the “very advanced”, the “somewhat advanced”, the “partially backward”, and the “extremely backward”. There is no single “absolutely correct way” of doing this; it all depends on the purpose of the analysis.
        In addition, it is quite possible to be advanced in one respect and backward in another. For example a man might have a high degree of class consciousness but be quite backward with regard to his attitude toward women and their unequal treatment and oppression. Or someone might be quite concerned and active with regard to the issue of the anti-war struggle, but have little interest or concern about the economic exploitation of the working class. In deciding how to categorize an individual at some particular time and place it is often necessary to understand which issues are presently at the forefront of social and political struggle. And of course it is also important to try to use a person’s strengths, and their advanced characteristics, to help them overcome their weaknesses or areas of relative backwardness.

“In any society and at any time, there are always two kinds of people and views, the advanced and the backward, that exist as opposites struggling with each other, with the advanced views invariably prevailing over the backward ones...” —Mao, “In Refutation of ‘Uniformity of Public Opinion’” (May 24, 1955), SW 5:172. [Of course we must acknowledge that in the short run the advanced views do not always prevail over the backward ones; it may take a prolonged struggle. —S.H.]

AFGHANISTAN — History of Resistance to Foreign Invaders

“The history of Afghanistan is one of resistance to various conquerors, armed bands, and coups d’etat. It is interesting that Alexander the Great, while conducting his conquest toward the east, took five years to break the resistance of the Pushtun tribes. Ten centuries later, Arab conquerors met the desperate resistance of the Afghan tribes. Six times they launched an offensive against Kabul and the area of the central plateau. Each time, they were forced to withdraw, having suffered heavy casualties....
        “In the 1830s, the Kabul Kingdom began expansion, but this was interrupted by the English invasion of 1838. The First Anglo-Afghan War, 1838 to 1842, began when an English corps entered southeast Afghanistan and, by 1839, occupied Kandahar, Gazni and Kabul. However, the Afghans resented the foreign conquerors and began guerrilla warfare against the British. This led to a massive rebellion in Kabul in Novermber 1841 that resulted in the destruction of the occupation army and the death of Shah Shuja, the British-supported figure head. The remaining English forces withdrew at the end of 1842.
        “Dost Mohammad was the leader of the unified forces of the Afghan government in their common armed conflict and victory over the aggressor.... His successor, Emir Sher Ali, ... strengthened the central power of the government and significantly increased the strength of the army, which showed a determined resistance to the second British invastion of 1878 to 1880.
        “As before, a British occupation corps (over 36,000 strong) invaded Afghanistan and seized Kandahar in January 1879.... [Although they forced a treaty, it...] elicited a powerful popular insurrection against the British that began in September 1879. On 27 July 1880, Afghan forces annihilated a British Brigade at Maiwand, near the city of Kandahar. Simultaneously, the British garrison in Kabul was caught in the grip of a seige by some 100,000 Afghan rebels. England was forced to abandon her plans for the conquest of Afghanistan and withdraw her forces from the country... [though an agreement] left Britain in control of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs....
        “In February 1919, Emir Amanullah Khan decided to take advantage or the results of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the civil war in Russia. He declared Afghanistan’s independence on 28 February. This served as the cause for the Third Anglo-Afghan War (3 May to 3 July 1919) in which the 340,000-man British Army met the 40,000 Afghan Army. At first, the British forces prevailed in the Battle for the Khyber Pass. On a different axis, through Waziristan, advancing Afghan forces were checked at the Thai fortress on 27 May. Simultaneously, the Pushtun tribes along the border rose in revolt. This uprising reinforced the independence movement in India. These uprisings forced London to seek a truce, which they signed in Rawalpindi on 8 August 1919. Preliminary peace talks continued, and the final peace treaty between Great Britain and Afghanistan was signed in November 1921.”
         —The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (2002), by the Russian General Staff, pp. 6-7. [Since this time there have been two more major invasions and wars against the Afghan people, by the social-imperialist Soviet Union (1979-1989) and the U.S. imperialist war there which began in 2001 and only ended (it seems for now!) twenty years later in 2021. The imperialists never seem to learn their lesson in Afghanistan! —Ed.]

AFGHANISTAN — British Imperialist Invasions Of

“From 1838 to 1919, British imperialism launched three wars of aggression against Afghanistan. When the third war broke out in 1919, Emir Amanullah, supported by the tribes, rose in resistance to the aggressors. At the time, tribal uprisings in the frontier areas threatened British imperialist rule in northern India. In August 1919, Britain was forced to sign an armistice agreement with Afghanistan and recognize its independence and freedom.
        “Stalin cited Afghanistan to illustrate a point he made in his The Foundations of Leninism in 1924. He said: ‘The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement.’ He pointed out: ‘The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism.’” —Reference note, Peking Review, #48, Nov. 25, 1977, pp. 27-28. [While the point that Stalin makes here is correct, it does not of course mean that the anti-imperialist struggle can be in safe and steady hands unless it is led by the revolutionary proletariat, nor is this a matter of a truly revolutionary struggle with regard to the social classes and rule within a country like Afghanistan. —S.H.]

AFGHANISTAN — Soviet Social-Imperialist Invasion Of
An imperialist war from late 1979 to early 1989 waged by the state-capitalist Soviet Union which attempted to maintain their control of Afghanistan through military support for their puppet regime there. In the end the Soviet imperialists were defeated by a very determined people’s war, but one based almost exclusively on nationalist and religious ideology.

“The Limited Contingent of Armed Forces of the Soviet Union entered the territory of Afghanistan in the last days of December 1979 ‘with the mission of rendering international aid to the friendly Afghan people and establishing advantageous conditions to prevent possible actions by the governments of neighboring countries against Afghanistan.’ Thus, with these extremely vague goals and limited military planning time, the Soviet peoples were cast into a bloody war that would last for nine years, one month, and eighteen days. The war took the lives or health of 55,000 Soviet citizens and did not result in the desired victory of the government.” —General Staff introduction, The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (2002), by the Russian General Staff, p. 1.

“For Soviet forces, the war in Afghanistan concluded with the withdrawal from the country on 15 February 1989. The Soviets should have withdrawn earlier, but it was first necessary for the Afghan leadership to begin the slowly developing politics of ‘national reconciliation’ in the country in 1986....
        “During its entire sojourn, the Soviet forces in Afghanistan compellingly demonstrated the results of the lack of political support for its actions by the government of the USSR. When the highest political leaders of the USSR sent its forces into this war, they did not consider the historic, religious, and national particularities of Afghanistan. After the entry, these particularities proved the most important factors as they foreordained the long and very difficult nature of the armed conflict. Now it is completely clear that it was an impetuous decision to send Soviet forces into this land. It is now clear that the Afghans, whose history includes many centuries of warfare with various warring groups, could not see these armed strangers as anything but armed invaders. And since these strangers were not Muslim, a religious factor was added to the national enmity. Both of these factors were sufficient to trigger a large mass resistance among the people, which various warriors thoughout history had been unable to overcome and which the Soviet forces met when they arrived in Afghanistan.”
         —Conclusion [by the Russian General Staff], ibid., pp. 304-305. [They go on to say that the Soviet difficulties were compounded by the decision to use many Soviet troops from Central Asia (Uzbeks, Tadjiks and Turkmen), which did not recognize the historic enmity of the Afghans toward these peoples, and their long history of mutual warfare. —Ed.]

“There are some disturbing revelations in this book [by the Russian General Staff, summing up their war in Afghanistan]. First, the real Soviet casualties from the war are still a secret, but almost double the official figures released by the Gorbachev regime in a great show of glasnost (openness). The official figures are 13,833 40th Army [of the Soviet Union] dead, but the actual figures are in the vicinity of 26,000. Second, the Soviet military had thoroughly penetrated the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) long before the invasion. Soviet advisers permeated the ministries of government and the units of the military. Soviet military advisers were found down in each battalion of the DRA Armed Forces. A battalion of Soviet Special Forces (Spetsnaz) provided security for the DRA president. This battalion of Soviet Central Asian commandos dressed in Afghan Army uniforms and helped secure the offical residence. A Soviet squadron of Central Asian pilots wore Afghan Air Force uniforms and flew aircraft with Afghan tail markings throughout the country. These units were in place up to a year prior to the invasion. Third, despite the Soviet Union’s penetration and lengthy experience in Afghanistan, their intelligence was poor.... Consequently, the Soviets never fully understood the Mujahedeen opposition nor why many of their policies failed to work in Afghanistan.
        “Several facts place the Afghan War in proper perspective and permit its proper assessment in the context of Soviet military, political, and social development. First, although violent and destructive, the war was limited and protracted. Its tempo and decisiveness did not match that of the series of short Arab-Israeli wars that scarred the Cold War years. It lacked the well-defined, large-scale military operations of the Korean War and the well-defined political arrangements that terminated that war. It also differed significantly from the oft-compared U.S. war in Vietnam. In Vietnam, American military strength rose to over 500,000 troops, and the Americans resorted to many divisional and multi-divisional operations. By comparison, in Afghanistan, a region five times the size of Vietnam, Soviet strength varied from 90,000 to 120,000 trooops. The Soviet’s four divisions, five separate brigades, three separate regiments, and smaller support units of the 40th Army strained to provide security for the 29 provincial centers and the few industrial and economic installations and were hard-pressed to extend this security to the thousands of villages, hundred of miles of communication routes, and key terrain features that punctuated and spanned that vast region.
        “Second, faced with this imposing security challenge, and burdened with a military doctrine, strategy, and operational and tactical techniques suited to a European or Chinese theater of war, the Soviet Army was hard-pressed to devise military methodologies suited to deal with the Afghan guerrillas. The Soviets formulated new concepts for waging war in nonlinear fashion, suited to operating on battlefields dominated by more lethal high-precision weapons. This new nonlinear battlefield required the abandonment of traditional operational and tactical formations, a redefinition of traditional echelonment concepts, and a wholesale reorganization of formations and units to emphasize combat flexibility and hence, survivability....
        “Third, the inability of the Soviet military to win the war decisively conemned it to suffer a slow bloodletting, in a process that exposed the very weaknesses of the military, as well as the Soviet political structure and society. The employment of a draft army with full periodic rotation of troops back to the Soviet Union permitted the travails and frustrations of war and the self doubts of the common soldier to be shared by the entire Soviet population. The problems so apparent in the wartime army soon became a microcosm for the latent problems afflicting Soviet society in general. The messages of doubt were military, political, ethnic, and social. In the end they were corrosive and destructive.”
         —Editors’ Preface (by retired U.S. Army colonel Lester W. Grau and former Soviet soldier Michael Gress), The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (2002), by the Russian General Staff, pp. xix-xx. [It is interesting how these editors seem to be concerned to draw out the general lessons involved in this war from the point of view of U.S. imperialism as well as that of Soviet social-imperialism. They seem to be arguing that the Soviet imperialists might have prevailed in Afghanistan if they had sent in many more troops and somewhat revised their strategy and tactics. In this they continue the dreams of all imperialists, that they can eventually prevail in their endless wars if only they persevere and strongly intensify them while at the same time adopting the proper military methods. They also generalize the U.S. lesson learned in the Vietnam war that drafted soldiers in imperialist armies can be very dangerous for the imperialists themselves. —S.H.]

“During the war, draft-age Soviet youth increasingly tried to avoid the draft and Afghanistan duty. Large bribes were paid to exempt or safeguard the children of the privileged. A disproportionate number of youth from factories and collective farms served in Afghanistan. The conscript’s morale was not great when he was drafted. At the training centers, conscripts were told that they were going to fight Chinese and American mercenaries. When they got to Afghanistan, they soon discovered that they were unwelcome occupiers in a hostile land. Morale further plummeted at this realization.... Many conscripts developed a narcotics habit in Afghanistan. They financed their habit by selling equipment, ammunition, and weapons. Some turned to violent crime. Soviet soldiers robbed merchants and passersby. At Soviet checkpoints, the soldiers would search Afghan civilians’ luggage for weapons. Routinely, those Afghans carrying large amounts of money were ‘sent to Kabul.’ Being sent to Kabul meant isolating the civilian and his luggage behind a wall and out of sight of the checkpoint. There, the soldiers would kill the civilian and take his money. In the field, villages were razed and the occupants murdered in retaliation for ambushes or suspected aid to the guerrillas. Some of these incidents seem to have been officially sanctioned, while others appear to have resulted from a breakdown in discipline.
        “The Soviet policy terrorized the population and did little to win them over to the government’s side.... During combat, the Soviets called in artillery and air strikes on villages without warning the inhabitants. Press gangs followed many sweeps and Afghan youth were conscripted into the Afghanistan army on the spot. The most famous Soviet crimes against Afghans were prosecuted, but many more were ignored. Often Soviet actions seemed deliberately designed to harden the resolve of the resistance.”
         —Editors’ comments (by retired U.S. Army colonel Lester W. Grau and former Soviet soldier Michael Gress), ibid., pp. 313-4. [All this is very reminiscent of the U.S. soldiers and their activities in Vietnam. It seems there are imperialist imperatives which lead every imperialist army to operate in more or less the same brutal, inhumane way in their attempts to suppress people’s wars. —Ed.]

AFGHANISTAN — U.S. Imperialist War
The longest lasting and most utterly futile U.S. imperialist war, which began in 2001 and twenty years later, in the spring of 2021, now appears to be finally coming to an end. Despite this longest war in U.S. history, there was never any possibility of a U.S. victory. Along with the endless destructive and self-destructive U.S. wars in the Middle East, this war in Afghanistan shows that the American imperialist domination of much of the world is rapidly coming to a whimpering and ignoble end.

“The [U.S. and allies] war in Afghanistan began in October 2001 with 76 consecutive days of bombing in which the U.S. air force and navy dropped 17,500 bombs. One of he USAF’s B-2s conducted a 44-hour sortie, the longest air mission in history. Warnings from aid agencies and the UN that the bombing and invasion risked worsening ‘impending mass starvation’ were brushed aside.... The Afghan warzone was also a test case for armed drones and for the mass use of battlefield assassination. The combination of special forces, local proxies and air power is now the standard American model of war. But as in Iraq, success was an illusion. Twenty years later the war continues, with an estimated death toll of 241,000 and counting, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
        “... If the two main forms of colonial war are urban occupation and rural fort-soldering, Basra [in Iraq, where it was a total fiasco on the part of British forces] exemplified the first and Helmand [in Afghanistan, also a total failure] the second.”
         —Tom Stevenson, “The Most Corrupt Idea of Modern Times”, a review of a book on the British army and its lackey-like support of American imperialism, London Review of Books, July 1, 2021, pp. 3-5.

“The people there are dead because we wanted them dead.” —Pentagon spokesman on the bombing of a village in Afghanistan that killed 93 civilians. Quoted in John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (2007), p. 264.

“An exorbitant cost
        “Nearly 2,400 U.S. service personnel have been killed in the Afghan war, and more than 20,000 wounded, many severely. The cost in treasure is staggering. Most estimates put it at around $4 trillion so far, but if you add in the future costs of the war, veterans and their health, as well as the interest on the money borrowed to finance the war, the figure approaches $8 trillion. Much of this money was wasted through corruption and mismanagement. John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told a Senate committee this year that ‘the United States threw itself into reconstruction with haste and hubris, with untested assumptions and unrealistic expectations, and with piles of cash and tight deadlines for spending it—too much, too fast, with too little oversight.’ By 2014, $109 billion had been spent on reconstruction alone—more in today’s dollars than the entire Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe—yet Afghanistan still lacks adequate roads, schools, and infrastructure. Opium remains the largest cash crop. The U.S. still spends $45 billion a year on Afghan security and economic aid—more than double Afghanistan’s GDP.”
         —“Briefing: Afghanistan, the Endless War”, The Week magazine, Sept. 14, 2018, p. 11.

“No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan. There is virtually no possibility of a military victory over the Taliban and little chance of leaving behind a self-sustaining democracy—facts that Washington’s policy community has mostly been unable to accept.
        “While many American troops stay behind steel-reinforced concrete walls to protect themselves from the very population they are supposed to help, it is striking how little discussion Afghanistan has generated in government and media circles in Washington. When it comes to Afghanistan, Washington has been a city hiding behind its own walls of shame and frustration....
        “[The U.S. war costs] about $45 billion there annually. The total cost of the war could reach as high as $2 trillion when long-term costs are factored in, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project. [See the quotation above for much higher estimates. —Ed.] All that to prop up an unstable government that would most likely disintegrate if aid were to end....
        “An abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan could conceivably provide a new symbol of the decline of American hard power.... The point is, we remain in Afghanistan out of fear of even worse outcomes, rather than in the expectation of better ones.
        “The Chinese, Pakistanis, Russians, Indians and Iranians, meanwhile, may all be benefiting more from America’s military operations in Afghanistan than the United States is. Our presence may provide just enough security to allow their energy and transport corridors to take shape, while also helping guard against Islamic terrorism on their southern border. Thus, our rivals build their own empires on the back of our declining one....
        “Spending billions and stationing thousands of troops there with no end in sight to stem a deepening chaos is simply not sustainable policy.” —Robert D. Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, an American ruling class think tank, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan”, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2019, op-ed section.
         [This was the perspective of the more realistic and rational segment of the U.S. imperialist ruling class. However, it also showed that even after 18 years of futile efforts to advance “American interests” in Afghanistan, the majority view in ruling class circles was still to keep the war going. The dominant part of the U.S. ruling class, including most liberal Democrats, still vainly hoped for an eventual “victory” and therefore wanted to continue the murderous imperialist war. But it seems that two years later, in 2021, President Biden has finally decided that the official war (at least) should be ended for now. —Ed.]

AFP
The Armed Forces of the Philippines (the government military forces).

AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS
[Intro to be added...]

“If the ANC does not deliver the goods, the people must do to it what they have done to the apartheid regime.” —Nelson Mandela, quoted in John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (2007), p. 177.